by Julian Goldsmith

Financial reporting limitations impacting businesses’ bottom lines

News
May 29, 20122 mins
Financial Services IndustryIT Strategy

Research out from Oracle and Accenture has found inefficient financial reporting could lead to unnecessary costs which would be taken out of more transformational projects.

According to the report, Challenges of Corporate Financial Reporting, less than half of the 1,123 financial staff surveyed had invested in financial reporting systems in the last three years.

On the whole, spreadsheets and emails are still being used as the core tools to record and distribute financial information used in regulated financial reporting processes.

According to Accenture Finance & Enterprise Performance Consulting Group executive director Scott Brennan, enterprise organisations typically spend as much as 1.5 per cent of yearly earnings on financial reporting processes.

He advocates more embedded financial data management through an ERP system, to break down the siloes in reporting.

He said: “The current practices are having a significant impact on investor confidence when companies cannot articulate their financial results clearly. Any improvement on financial reporting systems will go straight through to the bottom-line.”

According to the report, over two thirds of respondents admitted that they have inadequate visibility of reporting processes. Over four fifths of finance managers reported that they find it difficult to control the quality of financial data across the course of their reporting.